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‘A Raisin in the Sun’: perfection at Play House
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Reviewed by Fran Heller
Contributing Writer
Oh, what a night!
Such a night was the opening of “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark drama about a black family’s search for identity and the elusive American Dream.
It’s at The Cleveland Play House through Nov. 30.
A sterling production, mesmerizing cast, and the brilliant direction of Lou Bellamy moved me deeply from start to finish. It’s one of the best productions I’ve seen at The Play House in many a season.
The timeline between Hansberry’s 1959 drama about a black family in Chicago struggling with poverty and prejudice and the recent presidential election (Barack Obama also hails from Chicago) is inescapable. Though rooted in the particulars of its day, the play speaks to us just as profoundly in the present.
Hope is riding high among Younger family members in expectation of the $10,000 insurance money that the newly widowed Lena Younger is about to receive. Lena wants to use it to move her family out of the ghetto and to fund her daughter Beneatha’s medical school education. Her son Walter Lee wants to invest it in a liquor store, which causes a rift in the household that only deepens when other factors intervene.
Hansberry was only 29 when she wrote “Raisin…” rightly described by The New York Times as “a play that changed American theater forever.”
Not only was it the first play by a black female playwright to be produced on Broadway and the first to be directed by a black director, it was also the first play to attract a mainstream black audience. “Raisin…” was prescient in its scope of issues ranging from generational conflict, assimilation and class, to the civil rights and women’s movements.
While segregation and racism are part of the picture, it is mainly a portrait of a family struggling to survive and the ties that bind or rend them apart.
The title is derived from a poem by Langston Hughes which begins with: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
Hansberry’s depiction of black life with its richly drawn characters and rippling with humor and heartbreak, is completely authentic. Bellamy’s forceful direction sweeps us up in the drama’s momentum like a tidal wave. Family tableaux of good times and bad melt into each other at breathtaking speed, every one a masterpiece of ensemble acting.
Vicki Smith’s cramped, crowded set of the Younger family’s South Side Chicago tenement apartment pulls us in at once. That sense of claustrophobia is heightened by the single window in the domicile, where a withering plant fights for light and air.
Franchelle Stewart Dorn is an irresistible force of nature as family matriarch Lena. Proud, deeply religious and fiercely protective of her family, Lena locks horns with both her strong-willed children.
David Alan Anderson is larger than life as the restless and volatile Walter Lee, hungry for money and success and angry at the system thwarting him. You can feel the self-loathing in Walter’s demeanor as he dons his chauffeur’s boots and uniform. Walter is a man of mercurial moods, and the chameleon Anderson captures them all.
The confrontation between mother and son is shattering.
Erika LaVonn evinces the weariness and strain as Walter’s much put-upon wife Ruth, who is pregnant with their second child. When Ruth learns that Mama has bought a house in a white neighborhood, LaVonn’s mix of fear and elation is poignant and funny.
Bakesta King is perfect as feisty Beneatha, a college student who wants to be a doctor. Her suitors include Adeoye as the regal-looking Joseph Asagai, a Nigerian student and nationalist, and Kyle Haden as the snobbish George Murchison, an American college student from an assimilated wealthy black family who has little use for his African heritage.
What poise in Aric Generette Floyd’s ingenuous portrait of Travis, Walter and Ruth’s 10-year-old son who, unlike his father, is content to become a bus driver.
Patrick O’Brien invests his character, Karl Lindner, a white man on a mission not of his own choosing, with self-conscious timidity. Damron Russel Armstrong makes a vivid cameo appearance as Walter Lee’s crestfallen friend Bobo.
Mathew J. LeFebvre’s tasteful costumes respect the time frame.
The nearly three-hour production went by like a minute. You could hear a pin drop in the capacity crowd on opening night, and the standing ovation was well deserved.
Credit artistic director Michael Bloom for bringing this American classic to The Play House for the first time. Theater doesn’t get any better than this.
WHAT: “A Raisin in the Sun”
WHERE: The Cleveland Play House
WHEN: Through Nov. 30
TICKETS & INFO: 216-795-7000, ext. 4, or www.clevelandplayhouse.com
Contributing Writer
Oh, what a night!
Such a night was the opening of “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark drama about a black family’s search for identity and the elusive American Dream.
It’s at The Cleveland Play House through Nov. 30.
A sterling production, mesmerizing cast, and the brilliant direction of Lou Bellamy moved me deeply from start to finish. It’s one of the best productions I’ve seen at The Play House in many a season.
The timeline between Hansberry’s 1959 drama about a black family in Chicago struggling with poverty and prejudice and the recent presidential election (Barack Obama also hails from Chicago) is inescapable. Though rooted in the particulars of its day, the play speaks to us just as profoundly in the present.
Hope is riding high among Younger family members in expectation of the $10,000 insurance money that the newly widowed Lena Younger is about to receive. Lena wants to use it to move her family out of the ghetto and to fund her daughter Beneatha’s medical school education. Her son Walter Lee wants to invest it in a liquor store, which causes a rift in the household that only deepens when other factors intervene.
Hansberry was only 29 when she wrote “Raisin…” rightly described by The New York Times as “a play that changed American theater forever.”
Not only was it the first play by a black female playwright to be produced on Broadway and the first to be directed by a black director, it was also the first play to attract a mainstream black audience. “Raisin…” was prescient in its scope of issues ranging from generational conflict, assimilation and class, to the civil rights and women’s movements.
While segregation and racism are part of the picture, it is mainly a portrait of a family struggling to survive and the ties that bind or rend them apart.
The title is derived from a poem by Langston Hughes which begins with: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
Hansberry’s depiction of black life with its richly drawn characters and rippling with humor and heartbreak, is completely authentic. Bellamy’s forceful direction sweeps us up in the drama’s momentum like a tidal wave. Family tableaux of good times and bad melt into each other at breathtaking speed, every one a masterpiece of ensemble acting.
Vicki Smith’s cramped, crowded set of the Younger family’s South Side Chicago tenement apartment pulls us in at once. That sense of claustrophobia is heightened by the single window in the domicile, where a withering plant fights for light and air.
Franchelle Stewart Dorn is an irresistible force of nature as family matriarch Lena. Proud, deeply religious and fiercely protective of her family, Lena locks horns with both her strong-willed children.
David Alan Anderson is larger than life as the restless and volatile Walter Lee, hungry for money and success and angry at the system thwarting him. You can feel the self-loathing in Walter’s demeanor as he dons his chauffeur’s boots and uniform. Walter is a man of mercurial moods, and the chameleon Anderson captures them all.
The confrontation between mother and son is shattering.
Erika LaVonn evinces the weariness and strain as Walter’s much put-upon wife Ruth, who is pregnant with their second child. When Ruth learns that Mama has bought a house in a white neighborhood, LaVonn’s mix of fear and elation is poignant and funny.
Bakesta King is perfect as feisty Beneatha, a college student who wants to be a doctor. Her suitors include Adeoye as the regal-looking Joseph Asagai, a Nigerian student and nationalist, and Kyle Haden as the snobbish George Murchison, an American college student from an assimilated wealthy black family who has little use for his African heritage.
What poise in Aric Generette Floyd’s ingenuous portrait of Travis, Walter and Ruth’s 10-year-old son who, unlike his father, is content to become a bus driver.
Patrick O’Brien invests his character, Karl Lindner, a white man on a mission not of his own choosing, with self-conscious timidity. Damron Russel Armstrong makes a vivid cameo appearance as Walter Lee’s crestfallen friend Bobo.
Mathew J. LeFebvre’s tasteful costumes respect the time frame.
The nearly three-hour production went by like a minute. You could hear a pin drop in the capacity crowd on opening night, and the standing ovation was well deserved.
Credit artistic director Michael Bloom for bringing this American classic to The Play House for the first time. Theater doesn’t get any better than this.
WHAT: “A Raisin in the Sun”
WHERE: The Cleveland Play House
WHEN: Through Nov. 30
TICKETS & INFO: 216-795-7000, ext. 4, or www.clevelandplayhouse.com
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